In the News 04.05.15 : Today’s Articles of Interest from around the Internets

“In an era when it has become fashionable for New Yorkers to grumble that their own city is becoming a sterile playland for the global-money set (Dubai with blizzards, basically), Los Angeles is enjoying a renaissance with a burgeoning art, fashion and food scene that has become irresistible to the culturally attuned.”

“Since Kickstarter’s debut in 2009, campaigns on the platform have raised $1.4 billion for the creators of more than 80,000 projects. In the process, the company and its crowdfunding competitors have invented a new sort of economic relationship, and a corresponding frontier of Internet acrimony. Disgruntled crowdfunders are not your typical Internet-commenting degenerates: In ZPM’s case, they are affluent, well-educated professionals, working in New York and Los Angeles as systems analysts, TV directors, research physicians specializing in adrenal pathology — the sorts of people you would expect to write off their $250 donation as a gamble gone sour. Yet they found, for reasons that weren’t always clear to them, that they couldn’t. A professor in Columbia’s graduate school of architecture wrote, on the private Slack forum, that he considered Polyakov to have “neither humility nor shame.” He continued, “I also think it entirely appropriate that he never work in technology, finance, consulting or the coffee fields (sorry, that kills the barista career) again.”

“In recent years, health trends became status signifiers to which mainstream Americans aspired. A high-end health food storegrew into a supermarket-chain juggernaut. Designer clothing is now yoga-wear. Refusing to vaccinate one’s children, or to eat gluten, became at one and the same time ways to announce that one is upscale, and ways to convey an ethical commitment to healthy living. It wasn’t about being snobbish toward families who consume “juice” drinks. It was about tsk-tsking their choices while slurping an $8 bottle of agave-sweetened, cold-pressed… fine, juice drink, but at least one that comes in a BPA-free bottle. “Healthy” living became associated with being upper class, and therefore glamorous. The pseudoscience embraced by the rich—a group who also have superior access to actual healthy living, as in proper medical care, safe places to exercise, and so forth—is now, in turn, marketed to the rest of the population.”

“The basic facts are not in dispute. More than 2.2 million people are currently incarcerated in US jails and prisons, a 500 percent increase over the past forty years. Although the United States accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population. The per capita incarceration rate in the US is about one and a half times that of second-place Rwanda and third-place Russia, and more than six times the rate of neighboring Canada. Another 4.75 million Americans are subject to the state supervision imposed by probation or parole.”

“The supposed mechanisms of energy healing, homeopathy, and acupuncture are unscientific and violate basic laws of physics and chemistry. Other alternative treatments, including many nutritional supplements, are unproven, unregulated, and occasionally dangerous. This month, the fight came to a very public head when a group of doctors sent an open letter to Columbia University, demanding the school remove Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has used his syndicated TV show to promote integrative medicine, including nutritional regimens, homeopathy, and reiki—a form of energy healing that claims to use ‘universal life force energy’ to ‘detoxify the body’ and ‘increase the vibrational frequency on physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels.’ But at the same time, integrative medicine has pushed such techniques into the mainstream.“